Carbon dioxide is “mothers’ milk” to all plants, and plants are “the daily bread” to all animals. Life is a carbon cycle. No life could exist on Earth without adequate carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Current levels are well below those optimal for life, and below levels which have prevailed for most of Earth’s history. If there is a crisis regarding CO2, it is the question: “where has it all gone?”

And to say that Australians are the world’s biggest carbon polluters (per capita) is lying with statistics.

Australia is one of the world’s biggest exporters of minerals, energy, food and fibres. This is done on a huge continent with massive transport distances using a small workforce. Are the boffins suggesting that we should reduce our emissions per capita by employing 10,000 foreign labourers with shovels and wheel-barrows instead of one Australian on an electric dragline, one on an electric shovel, one on a diesel truck, and two driving an electric train?

Our government is punishing us for our efficiency. Carbon tax liability, if any, should fall on those who consume the resources. Those who produce the surplus for consumption by others are the heroes of society – even our federal government cannot redistribute wealth unless someone first produces a surplus to redistribute.

The economy and the climate have been cooling for years – it is stupid to keep carrying dead weights like the carbon tax, or subsidising expensive toys like green power.

“Without a direct cost, there will be no transition to a low carbon economy, smooth or otherwise. Major polluters will still be paying for just 5 per cent of their emissions in 2050.” – Jan Wright, NZ Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment

“Without a direct cost, there will be no transition to a low carbon economy, smooth or otherwise. Major polluters will still be paying for just 5 per cent of their emissions in 2050.” – Jan Wright, NZ Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment

I heard her on Morning Report a few days back and thought that if she believes that shifting the burden from taxpayers to major “polluters” she is seriously deluded. I wonder if she has thought how those major “polluters” will recover their costs and who will be paying?

Thing is Robin, the emitters in the electricity generation sector are efficient before the tax but it’s the tax that produces the inefficiency.

I’m talking about CCGT and coal-fired generators for example. These are best run as a constant base load without ramping up and down causing unnecessary wear and maintenance costs but when wind is given the luxury of gaining priority by offering supply at 0$/MWh then the gas and coal operators have no choice but to conform to the inefficiency of that regime.

The wind is there only because of the economic inefficiency caused by the tax which is loaded on to gas, coal and geothermal – not because of its natural competitiveness.

Ms Wright doesn’t seem to grasp that the Kyoto Protocol obligations were a one-off phenomenon with a 5-year lifespan. They resulted from a ‘grand bargain’ between USA and EU 15 years ago, when emissions were seen to be an exclusively rich-country problem.

The irony of it all was that EU already had its post-1990 credits in the bank, and USA never attempted to ratify or honour the obligation.

Mandatory GHG reductions, backed by financial penalties, will never be accepted again. They are history.

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Hot spot doesn’t exist

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GHG fingerprint missing

About 2000, climate scientists predicted and the IPCC agreed that, if the global temperature was strongly influenced by carbon dioxide (or GHG generally), there would be a unique "fingerprint" of that influence high over the tropics — a tropospheric "hot spot". So they started looking for it. Pretty soon after that, some of them made up wild claims that they'd found it, but at the same time others were inventing fanciful reasons for why it wasn't there. It's still missing.